In late March a bushfire destroyed 16 homes in the small town of Dereel, south of Ballarat.

During the emergency, communications were limited by a lack of sufficient mobile phone coverage in the area.

Tracey Taylor is a Dereel resident helping to compile a petition to have a mobile phone tower installed.

She says Telstra has told her that in 2007 Dereel residents chose not to have a tower installed, but she says they didn't want one installed in the proposed location.

Ms Taylor says now Telstra is saying it doesn't have the money to invest in a mobile phone tower before the coming fire season.

"We don't find that acceptable. They made a net profit of $3.9 billion last year. We've got the fire season coming up, a lot of people are jumpy, we've already had two grassfires in the Dereel area and we aren't even in summer yet."

She says locals have collected 1200 signatures so far and hope to present the petition to Telstra and the local member Sarah Henderson.

"It's not just for people who live in the community, it's for people's friends, relatives to be able to get a hold of people who live in the community.

"If it rains out here, we lose landlines, and it can take Telstra five weeks to come out to fix a landline."

Ms Taylor says there has recently been a National Broadband Network tower installed in the area.

"If they haven't got the capital to build their own tower, can they look at co-locating on the NBN tower? Does it have the right frequency there? We want to see them taking action to try to fix it."

The Federal Coalition promised $100 million nationally for mobile phone towers during the election campaign.

Ms Taylor says the Premier Dr Napthine has pushed to have Dereel prioritised, as did Ms Henderson before the election.

Ms Taylor says while Telstra is a private company, they still have a duty of care to their customers.

"We need them to take notice, we need them to show us that they're doing something. We're not going to go away."

Mobile phone coverage - or lack thereof - proved to be a huge problem for residents in Dereel, where 16 homes were destroyed by a bushfire in March. Jan Convey's property was damaged by the fire, and Tracey Taylor and Jade Woodall used Facebook to coordinate relief efforts.
(Lily Partland - ABC Ballarat)